Scenery of Bishōjo -- An Introduction to Modern Bishōjology
Abstract: Stories are personified to gods and spirits, and Bishōjo has the same function today, therefore all information can be regarded as Bishōjo.
This article was originally published in "Kokasha Vol. 184" from Jidaisakugosha (a group of Japanese university students) in January 2015. With the group's permission, here I post this after minor revisions and translation into English.
I hope this article would introduce one viewpoint of Japanese "Kawaii" or "Bishōjo" culture to the foreign readers. It is related to the traditional spiritual mind of Japanese, but I believe it is also founded on some universal basis of human's mind. This is why I translated this article into English.
Original Japanese version is here:
0 Preface
I don't know why people often said I was weird.
I didn't mind it.
There are many, so many friends in the world. Why do you mind the hatred from only a tiny part of them?
All of those who said I was weird were, I say, "humans".
I dedicate this essay as a basis of the evolution and development of mankind. I would like to describe the principle that lays under all behavior of human. It consists of two concepts - "Story" and "Bishōjo". These concepts seems to define my thought, and also many people's thought in this same age.
Bishōjo meant cute girl characters in Japanese comics and animations. But this description is of a classic sense, or even anachronic. Therefore I use "Bishōjo" as a technical term in this essay.
Although major part of this essay was written by 2015, I think it is still applicable in 2022. I even say it has become more useful. In this 7 years, technologies of virtual reality spotlighted the aspect of "Bishōjo as a self". On the other hand, increasing presence of Bishōjo has stimulated furious arguments about moralilty of Bishōjo expression. In such a situation, I believe it is important to discuss a fundamental question, "What is Bishōjo?". I would like to publish several essays about Bishōjo hereafter, and all of them will be based on the idea in this essay.
The former part of this essay states that the thoughts of human are constructed in the unit of "Story". It means that the intelligence of human enabled us not only to adapt to the present environment for life but also to simulate non-present environments or selves. The latter part states that the stories are symbolized by deities or heroes, or Bishōjo today, to be operated by thinking and generate new stories. Story and Bishōjo are tightly connected through an intellectual operation called anthropomorphism. I believe the readers would agree with the true power of Bishōjo, which is beyond just an object of sexual desire.
1 Story
Whether they exist or not is relatively not important. Important thing is that the universe works as if they exist.
1-1 Functions of story
Everything in our linguistic activities is story. If only the minimal subject-predicate relationship is put into words, it TELLS something. Even if it is just a one word, we can supplement words like "There is" or "I want" etc., according to a situation. Story is not more than this. Since human is not the only animal that uses language, other animals tell stories too with various complexities.
However, no animal depends more on story for its life than human. We can use language to think about something that is not present in front of us or something that does not exist. We can also transfer these thought to others by language. This ability enabled us the solidarity beyond personal surrounding. Combination of language and imagination made human. Defense against enemies, hunting, gathering, and trades with other tribes became much efficient with the solidarity through language.
In complex societies, we rely on things that are not present and only understandable through stories. Why can we do that? It is due to the ability of bringing out rules for our behavior from just a description of objects. Concepts of magic are the most direct appearance of this ability.
James Fraser classified magic into Imitative magic and Contagious magic. Imitative magic is supported by an expectation that every actions cause analogous situations to them. For example, pounding a nail into a strawman for placing a curse on someone is a typical imitative magic. On the other hand, contagious magic is based on a concept of influence remaining between things once being in touch. Imitative magic and contagious magic are so fundamental thoughts of human that they can be seen all over the world.
Imitative magic mediated between story and guide of behavior. Let's consider the following situation; an ancient community thought that rain falls by a will of someone on the sky. And they expressed it as a story of a human hero who successfully negotiated with the someone on the sky for rain. This is merely a description of one event in the past. However, thought of imitative magic urges people to do an analogous ritual by themselves to beg the heaven for rain. Reproducing an analogous situation to the former part of the story, a result analogous to the latter part occurs. Or even just narrating the story could be a ritual act to realize it.
When such a story-driven act is established in the society, the realism of the original story becomes less important for the people. In order to maintain the story, they even modify their behavior or develop technologies to certainly realize the story. The reason why they make effort to maintain the story is that stories enables people to achieve great projects. Stories can widely propagate by language and tie strangers each other. In spite of various geographies and lives, story has a potential of flying over such differences.
Moreover, stories mutates on the way of propagation. This feature often appears as a formulation of a bigger system of stories by being related to other stories, keeping structure of an individual story. Action to the nature such as begging rain or curing disease might be based on dependent observations and dependent stories in initial. However, when the number of stories increases, people starts to relate them together; like "The god of rain and the god of wheat field are husband and wife." or "The god of disease is ruled by the god of death.", for example. Or we can also consider a case of a contact between different cultures. In this case, mutation of the stories could be "Our god of rain and their god of rain are the same."
Generally saying, information duplicates itself with acceptance of some mutations. Being twined into a complex story, it gets an useful feature; it can keep its core concept even after mutation. Let's recall genome. Genome is a text written in nucleotide sequence which accepts partial mutation and continues self-duplication (sometimes it fails). This feature even allows artificial modification.
Hence, a big system containing many individual stories is formed. This is called "myth". The set of guides of behavior extracted from here is called religion. Since stories rule humans' acts, a story telling about wider range in time and space can influence more people. Therefore, when the leaders attempt to govern the larger society, or people desire a more widely applicable theory and security of life, the group of stories tends to inflate.
Within the prehistorical age, human experienced above. However, the relationship between human and story has rapidly changed in the modern era.
1-2 Revolution of story
In the ancient time, stories were not merely fantasies. They had a power for inviting rain and growing new lives. Ancient people believed these were caused by story. But how about today? As the decaying influence of traditional religions, did stories also lose their power? The answer is no.
Strength of a story is determined by its causality. A strong story makes people to expect "if do this, then this occurs." in the real world. It results to let the story be shared by many people. We can call such a story "scenario" or "role model". One of the strongest stories is natural science. This communal fantasy provides us with the most accurate and restricting predictions. Or, giving familiar examples, "Entering the University of Tokyo is a platinum ticket of life." (from "Dragon Zakura") or "Pornography makes sexual offender." are typical stories as well. All acts of human are still ruled by stories. It is because we cannot form understanding of the world unless any presumption.
However, the behavior of story has partly changed these days. What changed is a manner of its propagation.
In the time when religions tightly connected to the foundations of people's life, the spatial range of the religions was confined in the range of local communities. But once the mobility of people and materials increased, religions started propagating far away. Global religious communities, like today's Judaism, appeared. Or religions interacted on the way of propagation and generated a new religious community. Such processes were repeated by the early 20th century.
Development of information technologies gradually pushed down the value of information. Paper, typography, telephone, and the Internet provided ordinary people with an opportunity to be senders of information. Millennium of oral transfers and painstaking stone monuments was over. Trivial information in daily life, that once did not deserve stone monument and clay tablet, was recorded and transferred. Then it created literature, art, and science. All of them are bundles of information that reflect human life and affect to human thought. They are stories.
As a result, the authorities of former myth and religion were diluted by enormous information, then small and modest stories flourished in the room left after myths. These stories have been presented as choices of decoration for each individual life. Surely the cost of information transfer decreased, but we could not reflect from filling up the vacant time with more and more information. Driven by growing quantity and variety of information, inessential joints formed many new communities. Individual is able to easily customize his own identity. Those who attracted by the story "Noble is voyaging the truth of the world." may desire to be a scientist. "Devoting one's life to hobbies is the human right." may make Otaku. His view is determined by the stories which aroused the deepest sympathy of him. What arouses his sympathy is determined by the stories he knew in the past. The stories he knew in the past are mainly determined by his parent.
No matter whether he intends or not, he starts to tell a new story based on his own sympathizing stories. Told story must affect to other people in some ways. When a story is shared and reproduced in the society scale, it is often called "common sense" or "norm". Today, although the scale of individual story has become smaller, the stories keep reproducing themselves and fighting each other for territory, by hopping over the hosts so called human.
1-3 Domination of story
Most stories generated by various media look like merely fantasies. It sounds silly to believe they are realized by imitating them. For example, the movie "Castle in the Sky" played in the late 20th century goes like this; A mineworker boy witnessed a beautiful girl falling from the sky. She turned out to be a royal heir of an ancient kingdom. They headed to the ruin in the sky, impeded by army, for unveiling the mystery of the ancient kingdom… Of course we know such an event does not occur in real even though it is often desired. Contrary to the rational sense, people began to expect that the core of this story - encounter with a noble girl and adventure for the truth of the world - may possibly occur. The "lifelike" impression given by its detailed illustration of emotion, beautiful animation, and lyrical music urged this expectation.
Perspective of the world has been diversified by flooding stories. This situation allows less reality to "What may happen", than "What I want to happen" and "What expressed with equal resolution to the real". I am afraid it might not a correct usage of English, but Japanese people sometimes call this feature "reality". Generally fantasies attempt to stimulate people's desire to love and adventure, but the movie above was remarkable due to the detailed and emotional story world in which the extraordinary adventure was mixed. Then it shifted the people's thought from "want to encounter a beautiful girl" to "might encounter a beautiful girl". Although this motif existed from the past as stories of exiled nobles ("Kisyu-Ryuri-Tan" in Japanese), development of technologies and liberation of stories make people feel it like a real possibility.
There are many example of an expectation shifted from just a desire. Japanese comic "Train Man" ("Densya Otoko") is a typical story of "Communication loser gets a beautiful and gentle girlfriend". In this case, "reality" was in thread of the online BBS instead of movie. It is a story of an outlier but we can believe ourselves as an outlier by sympathizing and following a story having strong "reality". Like ancient people held a ritual to imitate myth, today we widely share a thought that "Behaving like a story makes destiny like story" about small stories.
We often call this thought of imitative magic as "flag", by analogy of computer engineering. Concept of flag apparently shows that the basic unit of human thought is not each act but sequence of them, namely, story. One of the most famous flag is death flag - "I will marry my childhood girlfriend in hometown, after this war." Bad presentiment can strongly affect to human's mind in a short term. However we also know a happy-end flag - "If lovers go to Todai together, then they will be happy." (from "Love Hina", Todai means University of Tokyo.) We know many people dancing for such a happy-end flag.
2 Bishōjo
"A humanoid interface created to contact with organism lives by information-integrated thought governing this galaxy. That's me."
2-1 Eve of Bishōjo era
Thus human was released from the drowsiness of a big story to the wilderness in which we have to choose our own small stories. It is a field of carnage where stories vigorously multiply, collide, and mutate. But human tried visualizing and controlling the power of stories since long before this liberation.
Story describes the world and changes it. Changing the world is changing the stories. We can say it as a dialogue with stories. Human created a technique to transfer stories in interactive format; anthropomorphism (or "personification"). Myth is full of characters. Not only heroes and founders but also spirit of water, god of fire, speaking animals and so on have human-like forms. We can regard this form as an interface of dialogue with us. When the instinct for survival was replaced by the desire to understand the law of the nature and utilize it, we started to consider the environment as "someone". We relate everything to human. We find human's face in a stain on the ceiling or a pattern on the back of insect.
When we desire to make a dialogue with the world, we assume a character there. Understanding of the nature was significantly deepened by assuming that it has a will, while we had only simple observations like "Fire is hot" before that. Anthropomorphism lets us assume a consistent principle behind the facts. View of the world changes, then the story of the world also changes. Then the ritual changes, and culture changes. The changed culture easily propagates to other communities by embedded in design of gods or spirits. In the scene of propagation, gods are not only personifications of the nature but also symbols of the story itself. Zeus represents the Greek myth, and Momotaro (Peach Boy) represents "Momotaro" tale.
Moreover, we can express a merger of stories as an interaction of characters, like conversation or intimacy of humans. One example is marriage of gods from different cultures. Thus we can visualize and even control a mutation of stories. A bundle of information incarnates to start interaction with other stories. Characters are career of the story who carry it far away. It is analogous to the quantum field theory in which a particle is generated from the field with some energy and scattered by other particles.
Today, it is reported from all over Japan that urinating and illegal disposal significantly decreased by setting a Torii (symbol of shrine's gate) on the roadside. Torii led personifying the roadside and generated a virtual character of "guardian of the roadside". The roadside started to claim "I am watching you, punishing you" and interfered to those who came to pollute there. As soon as the effect of Torii was known, similar attempts spread all over the country. It means that the guardian of the roadside multiplied and propagated rapidly.
Now we are approaching to the core statement of this essay. Gods and spirits were personification of the story and had functions described above. Today, these functions are carried by Bishōjo.
2-2 Power of Bishōjo
Anthropomorphism provided us with an interface for interaction between stories and humans. It is natural that Bishōjo was chosen as a new format of anthropomorphism. There are two reasons coming from the situation of the modern age. One is the emphasis on the inner mind and private relationships empowered by rise of small stories. Other is flooding of universal awe of female that had been in human's mind, caused by intensified interaction of information. This flooding was followed by dilution.
Young female was an object of respect, fear, and desire mainly due to its ability of reproduction. That is why it was chosen as a subject of paintings, sculptures, and poetry so often. Thanks to the information technologies, those means of art was widely shared by ordinary people. Today arts can be created, published, and criticized without high cost. This situation makes arts not only reflections or caricatures of the real, but also subjects of new arts. It means art is a semi-independent region from the real. Bishōjo is no exception. Through a long chain of pastiche and differentiation, the initial context of being an alternative of real sexual object became less important. Instead, a concept of "something good" was extracted from Bishōjos. Bishōjo can be a sexual object, but can be not.
Bishōjo has two aspects; a living individual in a story and a symbol of truth, goodness, and beauty. In other words, personifying a story by Bishōjo has the following three merits;
Bishōjo is welcomed by both male and female.
Bishōjo interacts with individual on equality.
Bishōjo induces a feeling of avoiding to be hated.
1 is because it is not necessary to be an object of male's sexual desire. 2 is a result of individualism. 3 is because it contains an aspect of "something good". All of these are essential conditions to replace gods.
1 and 3 makes us to empathize to a story and desire to know more about story. Finally we desire to engage in a story. I say Bishōjo is an interface to promote empathy. This empathy, however, might not be comprehensible for one who does not imagine any Bishōjo in a story. As we see later, we cannot say we always empathize if only there is a Bishōjo.
This dependency of empathy on individual is related to 2. In contrast to gods being shared by a community in the past, Bishōjo belongs to each individual. In addition, Bishōjo allows us to feel friendship and love as a equal neighbor. Moreover, an individual can propagate Bishōjos he found, by publishing comics or novels or so on via Internet. This will make other people imagine Bishōjos in the same story and empathize into a new thing.
We must note the heavy impact of empathy because it directly means the life influenced by the story where small stories compose the life and the world. Bishōjo is an agent of mind disease. It is carried by expressions. It infects with its story. This is a gods' new existence in the information society.
2-3 Discovery of Bishōjo
The Bishōjo culture, which exchanges Bishōjos as symbols of stories, was limited in a region of novel, comic, game and anime by the early 21st century. This situation changed by "Moe rice" in 2008. Bishōjo began to appear in all cultural regions from this epoch. "Moe rice" is packaged with an illustration of Bishōjo and sold by Ugo Agricultural Cooperative in Akita prefecture. Some people said it pandered to the increasing population of subculture, but the fact was that this rice got public attention and urged various product sellers and service providers to create Bishōjo mascots. Subculture side began to seek a way to promote their anthropomorphism expressions.
However, I say Moe rice itself was not enthusiastically loved despite its credit of mitigating the hesitation of ordinary people against using Bishōjo. More radical change was caused by Hatsune Miku. Her most important feature was not having any stories other than one visual, the simplest profile, and a vocal function. She was thoroughly a "material". Secondary I note that any song is a story with some length, creators could differentiate Miku's visual in videos, and the system of Nikoniko Douga (a video platform where Vocaloid boom started) was suitable to promote various creations by amateurs and their network.
There were Bishōjo as a material, sufficient amount and variety of stories, differentiation of visual to express that variety, and environment where information rapidly propagates and reproduces. These conditions notified the human society of the fact that we can "substitute" Bishōjo into any story as its subject.
Please imagine the case that we have Hatsune Miku sing a song of the message "Eat rice." and published a video. Up to the lyrics, this video may personify rice to a Bishōjo. It is more likely when Miku in the video has a visual having features related to rice. But at the same time, Miku in this video is A SYMBOL OF THE MESSAGE "EAT RICE" ITSELF. This occurs in other situations as well. There are some kind of message that sounds hollow when human tells, like videos of "Disappearance of Hatsune Miku" or "Hayabusa". Hatsune Miku can represent even such messages. It would have been hard if Miku had been just a vocal function without Bishōjo visual, or if she had had her own story in initial.
Hatsune Miku radically extended our concept of personification. PERSONIFICATION CAN BE APPLIED TO ANY INFORMATION. If only information is a story describing something (yes, it is always the case), and human desires to make an interaction with it, then that information is personified in some extent. And as we saw in section 2-1, personification boosts story's power to interact with other stories and reproduce new stories. Actually, success of Hatsune Miku generated a new music genre calles "Vocaloid music" and contributed to the expansion of creator population. Also there are many post-Miku vocaloids, as well as expressions of communication between them and Miku.
2-4 Acceptance of Bishōjo
Let's go back to the Moe rice. Some people bought it being obsessed by the idea that Otaku must commit to anything related to Bishōjo, but probably they didn't establish dialogue with the Bishōjo on the package. It may be because the product didn't have enough cues to arouse the desire of interaction with her. In terms of traditional religions, it can be said that any spiritual power is invested into the symbol of god. Personification to Bishōjo does not mean an absolute empathy but her behavior makes difference of force to arouse empathy. This is why many town-development projects using Bishōjo after Moe-rice were in obscurity.
In the moment when it leaves the producer's hand, the Bishōjo of the story of rice starts "the story of the Bishōjo and the consumer". It is natural consequence of propagation. More precisely saying, when the personification of the story of rice is transferred from the package to the consumer's brain, it changed to "the personification of images inspired in the consumer's brain by seeing the personification of the story of rice". Hereafter all relationships between human and Bishōjo are formed upon this new story. Complicated images are required for vivid personification and continuous purchasing. Detail of images depends on the stories stored in each consumers, but we can partially control its direction by additional information.
For example, how about publishing a series of cartoon on the official website of the rice like this? - An university student boy buys Moe-rice on website. That night a Bishōjo of its package visits his apartment. She lectures him how to cook the rice and side dishes, has dinners with him, support his love to the girlfriend, …and time passes by, she disappears when he got married. She appears again at his last moment, whispers her love, and is burned altogether with his corpse. …And time passes by, his grandson becomes an university student, and buys Moe-rice on website…
With such a role model, Bishōjo is no longer merely an illustration on a rice package. Consumers know they can regard her as a neighbor who lives together with them and forms their body. They know they can love her. Such a method has already been attempted in many scenes and some of them succeeded to arouse attachment to stories by Bishōjo. Their successes are supported by atmosphere of "story with you", typically boosted in fan arts. Hatsune Miku is the most typical example. "Kantai Collection (KanColle)", a game which personifies the warships in WWII, is another famous example. The most important thing is supporting the various relationship between each consumer and Bishōjo.
2-5 Omnipresence of Bishōjo
Personification of story is a bit abstract statement. It can be understood in other words; a personified Bishōjo is one who knows all information of the story, although she does not always tell it to us. A warship is personified to who knows everything about the ship as if it was herself. History of war is personified to who knows everything about the wars as if she saw them by herself. Bishōjo is Laplace's demon of the story.
How can we know the boundary between knowledge of story and knowledge of material? Information about a warship could include the circumstances of building or the effect that it brought to wars. Thus the story unlimitedly extends and cannot be distinguished from the story of the whole world history, can it?
One answer to this question is "It doesn't matter." Here we imagine the particle theory in physics. Any particle has no solid boundary and spreads in space as a wave, but we determine its effective size from the cross section (probability of scatter) of the collision with other particles. Similarly, we can regard material object as a characteristic region of the story spreading in the information space. I say, REGION WHERE STORIES ARE DENSE IS MATERIAL. What was built by Hachi-Hachi fleet project, what was called one of Big-7, what was sacrificed to Operation Crossroad - the intersection of those information is called "Battleship Nagato". We cannot know whether materials truly have clear boundaries or not, because we can see only the world after categorizing by language. The true world might be chaos, but we never see it.
Thus material and story are unified. It is similar to the picture of relativity which says that energy and mass are equivalent. By applying a generation operator to the field filled with energy of story, then a material object appears. Even ourselves exist here by applying biological reactions to the sea of information which contains the evolution history of life, the development history of society, and the life history of an individual. Human is an intersection of these information. Its definition will change by time. This change may occur in our subjectivity. In other words, what changes is the story of "What is human?". That is enough for us, isn't it?
When we desire to make interaction with a story, it condenses to Bishōjo around the region where he most emphasized (or where he felt largest "density"). Material is easily chosen as a core of Bishōjo, but we have to remember that the whole story of the material is personified, not only the material itself.
Everything in the world is described as stories. Every stories generate Bishōjos. When we are conscious of something, there Bishōjo appears. Let's say - NOTHING CANNOT BE BISHŌJO. We live in a dawn of such an era.
3 World
"I believe… no one fears… a dreamy scenery."
3-0 Scenery of Bishōjo
We find stories in bundles of information, generate Bishōjos from stories, imagine lives with Bishōjos, and are led by Bishōjo to change our destiny. It is collaboration of human and Bishōjo. I think its frontier is in Japan. I wonder if it originates to the polytheism culture kept under the unification by Yamato Dynasty. Many local myths were recorded in the oldest history books. Today we keep the culture of "eight-million-gods" and feel like gods can be everywhere. But the number of Bishōjos living in Japan in 21st century is far larger than eight million.
Let's look back today. Who shook your shoulders when you woke up? Who covered your back with the texture of cotton? Who held your legs and waist with a belt? Who told you "Sorry for the crowded train." passing the vibration from rail to you? Who told you "I wasn't waiting for you at all!" withdrawing the fare? Who sits alone in a corner of your room after you left for the university? Who was formalized by Newton and others based on astronomical observations? Who is the official language of Germany? Who gazes you from behind of the rice ball shelf in co-op? Who has a club room in the fourth floor of the student hall? Who made winters in Tokyo so cold? Who hides under your bed when you open the door of your room? Who watches your hand while you are cooking dinner? Who complains in the garbage bag? Who flows out from the shower when you turn on the faucet? Who appears in your dream every night and who is forgotten by you every morning? Who are you?
Thus we knew Bishōjo. We talk with everything, we love everything, and we live embraced by everything in this universe. There is no loneliness…NO, even loneliness is Bishōjo. All the past, present, and future become our sweethearts. Led by countless Bishōjos, now we shall begin our eternal adolescence.
Fin.
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